Unofficial news and tips about Google

November 16, 2012

Export Google Reader Data in Google Takeout

When Google Reader dropped support for the built-in sharing features and integrated with Google+, the settings page added a long list of JSON files you could save to your computer to export your followers, the items you've shared or starred, your notes and more. Until then, you could only export your subscriptions.

Now all these files can be downloaded from Google Takeout, a service that lets you export data from Google+, Google Drive, Google Contacts, Picasa Web, YouTube and more. Reader is probably the only Google service that sends users to Google Takeout to export data.

Unfortunately, you need to download 8 files even if you only want to export the subscriptions OPML file. Google has to create a ZIP archive first, so you'll have to wait a lot more. Instead of downloading a small XML file, you need to download a large archive (34MB for my account). That's a general issue with Google Takeout, which only lets you download all your YouTube videos, all your Picasa Web photos, all your Google Drive files.

Another service recently added to Takeout is Google Latitude. You can download a JSON file with your location history data.

Let's hope that developers will create cool apps that parse these JSON files and make them more useful. Maybe Google should also offer human-readable formats like HTML.

18 comments:

Doubtful, they been building these tools into all their services over the last couple of years, eventually all of Google services will be offering their export functions through the data liberation front.

Bloglines imported my feeds from the xml file this morning with no changing of file names, etc...

And Feedly is planning to duplicate the api, and will switch your feeds to it when it's ready if you add your google reader to it now, and I'm certain some of the rest that rely on google reader will do the same (I hate Feedly's layout).

The best Google application next to Search, maybe better! I will miss it. I downloaded my subscriptions from takeout and renamed subscriptions.xml to subscriptions.opml and imported them back into Liferea.

Been trying to get my reader archive...but once the archive is created, and I hit the download button (after confirming my password again..)I get sent to an error page..Internet Explorer Cannot display your webpage (with a diagnose yoru problem button)